The New Pictures

The Fan (20th Century-Fox) features a group of talented actors pretending unsuccessfully to be characters in a play by Oscar Wilde. At its original best, 57 years ago, Lady Windermere's Fan was little more than a stylish vehicle for Wilde's wicked quips and epigrams. At its 20th Century movie worst, it emerges as a sentimental woman's drama--a sort of Stella Dallas in turn-of-the-century stays.

Hollywood has given The Fan some handsome costumes and sets, retained a few of Wilde's wittier lines, and plumped out the familiar plot, like a tired old pillow, into a new but improbable shape. As the wayward Mrs. Erlynne, Madeleine Carroll is going about in present-day London. So is the once dashing Lord Darling-:on (George Sanders). Weighed down by :heir years and greasepaint, they piece together the old story in flashbacks.

Also present: Richard Greene and Jeanne Grain as Lord and Lady Windermere, and Martita (Great Expectations) Hunt as the malicious Duchess of Berwick. Conspicuously absent in this Otto Preminger-directed revival: the sparkling style, pace and timing that made Wilde's plays amusing even at their emptiest.

Champion (Screen Plays, Inc.; United Artists) is a full-length portrait of a middleweight heel. Based on a hard-bitten short story by the late Ring Lardner, it is a brilliant example of the kind of punch a mall studio can pack, if it has an intelligent script and a smart director. To get by the Johnston Office, Scripter "Carl Foreman made his hero, Midge Kelly Kirk Douglas), a shade gentler than Lardner's original. The movie Midge, for instance, does not paste his dear old mother in the jaw. Otherwise he is just about as unlovely a piece of humanity as Hollywood has ever treated at length.

Loyal at first only to his mother and his crippled brother (Arthur Kennedy), Midge gets his start in a fight-club preliminary. With a natural yen for money and bloodletting, he soon gets a professional manager (Paul Stewart) and starts dropping other middleweights like bulls in a stockyard. He also becomes adept at dropping his friends, usually with a kick in the teeth. In one way or another, he gets rid of his bride (whom he married at the point of a gun), his manager, a couple of girl friends, and even his brother.

Champion is hard & fast at slugging the audience. It is stunningly photographed and the pace seldom slackens. At its brilliant best in the fight scenes, which are probably the most brutally believable ever screened, Champion is equally good at creating suspense. In a chase sequence, when Midge is being cornered in an empty arena by faceless racketeers, the camera movement in & out of the vast shadowy beehive of tunnels, arcades and aisles is expertly terrifying.

But first to last, Champion is a tough-minded, penetrating character study which makes Midge neither an inhuman monster nor a whining victim of circumstances. It simply focuses a hard glare on his unreflective brutality, his arrogance and his bursts of self-interested decency. Much of its punch comes from the sensitive performances of Arthur Kennedy and Paul Stewart. Its final wallop it owes to Kirk Douglas, who fills out every corner of Kelly's unattractive pug with bulging assurance and conviction.

Champion proved to be a clean knockout for practically everybody connected with it. To get ready for his remarkable fistic performance, Actor Kirk Douglas, 32, trained for a month and a half, six days a week, under the knowing eye of "Mushy" Callahan, onetime world's junior welterweight champion. Until then, the nearest Douglas had ever come to boxing was skipping rope at St. Lawrence University in preparation for a tournament in which he became intercollegiate wrestling champion of the Eastern Division (1938-39)* By the time Mushy finished with him, Douglas was in such good ring training that the double who was hired to do his fight scenes never got before the camera.

Douglas had been known in Hollywood as a competent actor (The Walls of Jericho, A Letter to Three Wives'), but Champion promptly doubled his price per picture. Warner Brothers took one look and signed him up for a seven-year, nine-picture deal at just under $1,000,000. His first two pictures for Warner will be Dorothy Baker's Young Man with a Horn and Tennessee Williams' The Glass Menagerie. He will also continue to do one film a year for Screen Plays, Inc., the welterweight studio which produced Champion.

Meanwhile, in their corner, Screen Plays, Inc.'s impresarios, Producer Stanley Kramer and George Glass, were sitting pretty. On something like $600,000 (chicken feed for a modern A movie), they had made a picture which some experts guessed would gross $3,000,000. They had also delivered a stiff uppercut to Hollywood's heavyweights. Sam Goldwyn promptly bought up the talents of Champion's young (34) Director Mark Robson (who, like Douglas, will continue to do one picture a year for Screen Plays). Aggressive little Screen Plays' next: Home of the Brave, the first of the new Hollywood cycle on the Negro problem (TIME, March 21).

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